Yuchen Liu
Master of fine art
Glasgow School of Art
Graduates: 2026
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting / Installation/Sculpture
My location: Glasgow, United Kingdom
Yuchen Liu
First Name: Yuchen
Last Name: Liu
University / College: Glasgow School of Art
Course / Program: Master of fine art
Graduates: 2026
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting / Installation/Sculpture
My Location: Glasgow, United Kingdom
About
Yuchen Liu (b. 2000) is a Chinese practice-led artist-researcher working across painting, installation, moving image and participatory projects. Her practice explores the perceptual relationship between human sensibility and non-human presences, focusing on how encounters with materials and environments shape perception, memory and spiritual resonance.
Her work often begins from personal experience and develops through sustained interaction with matter. In earlier projects, this took form through imagined plant archives and speculative life-worlds. During her recent study at the Glasgow School of Art, stone has become a central medium in her practice. Its density, resistance and geological duration offer a way to slow down the act of making and to stay with material change over time.
Informed by phenomenology and material culture, Liu approaches stone as an active participant within relational processes. Through repeated touch, responsive surfaces and spatial arrangement, she allows its physical qualities to shape the rhythm, structure and atmosphere of the work. Layered mineral textures and immersive settings explore the energy that emerges between body, matter and environment, inviting attentive looking and perceptual reflection, while opening quiet ways of sensing care, continuity and the vitality of the material world.
These works come from time spent with stones. Stones are not still objects here, but active participants in the making. They hold time, pressure, touch and memory, while their weight, colour, texture and resistance guide the rhythm of my hands. Through cutting, placing, layering and working with their surfaces, the paintings, the small forms between drawing and sculpture, and the atmosphere of the presentation slowly take shape. For me, making is a way of paying attention: a quiet love letter to stones, and to the flow that appears between body, material and space. Together, the works ask how staying with stones might become a way of staying with care, continuity and the quiet vitality of the material world.
Competitions
